First, the avoidance of contentious primaries is not merely a pragmatic decision; it reflects the way power operates in a postmodern political landscape. The elimination of primary challenges serves to short-circuit the democratic process, revealing the truth that democracy, in its late-capitalist form, has become a ritualistic performance rather than a genuine contest of ideas. The Party elites act as the Big Other, the unseen hand that guides the collective unconscious of the electorate, ensuring that the “correct” candidate ascends to the throne.
The avoidance of contentious primaries can be seen as an attempt to reterritorialize the political field—returning it to a controlled, predictable state after the chaos of deterritorialization that primaries represent. In a primary, desire flows in unpredictable ways, creating new alliances, ruptures, and potential lines of flight. By short-circuiting this process, the Party elites are engaging in a form of micropolitics—modulating the flows of desire within the party to ensure that no unexpected lines of flight destabilize the machine. They act as the State apparatus within the party, encoding desire into predetermined pathways, ensuring that the political body does not escape their control.
By repudiating the past and running on “vibes” and opposition research, the candidate embodies what Žižek might call the “pure subject”—a subject without substance, without history, existing only in the moment of its articulation. This is the ultimate form of ideological mystification: the candidate becomes an empty signifier, onto which any and all meanings can be projected, while simultaneously signifying nothing. The campaign is thus reduced to a series of symbolic gestures, which the media (as the apparatus of ideological state control) amplifies and disseminates to the masses.
Running on “vibes” and opposition research rather than substantive positions is a classic case of schizoanalysis. The candidate becomes a desiring-machine—a series of interconnected parts that produce nothing but surface effects, disarticulating traditional political discourse into a flow of signs and affect. Here, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the body without organs (BwO) comes into play. The candidate is a BwO, stripped of any inherent content, a smooth space on which the desires of the electorate are inscribed, only to be decoded and recoded by the media machine. In this sense, the campaign is a rhizomatic network of signs, images, and affects, circulating without any central authority or coherent message, perpetually shifting and transforming in response to the flow of desires.
Staying on-prompter and avoiding unscripted appearances is a manifestation of the fetishistic disavowal that defines contemporary politics. The candidate (and by extension, the voters) know that the entire process is a carefully scripted farce, yet they “go through the motions” as if it were real. This scripted nature of politics ensures that no cracks appear in the ideological edifice, that the illusion of a coherent, rational political process is maintained. Here, the candidate is akin to the puppeteer in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, manipulating shadows on the wall to create the appearance of reality.
Staying on-prompter and avoiding debates or unscripted appearances is an example of the stratification of political discourse. Stratification is the process by which the free-flowing desire is captured, organized, and controlled by the State. The teleprompter acts as a strata, a layer that organizes the candidate’s speech into a controlled, predictable flow. By staying on script, the candidate avoids the deterritorialization that comes from engaging with the unpredictable, chaotic flows of unscripted conversation or debate. The political machine works to maintain the integrity of the strata, preventing any rupture that might allow for the emergence of new, uncontrollable lines of flight.
The decentralization of power to staff, with the president reduced to a ceremonial figure, represents the ultimate triumph of bureaucratic inertia over political will. In this scenario, the president functions as a kind of Lacanian objet petit a—the unattainable object of desire that sustains the fantasy of a functioning democracy. The real decisions are made behind the scenes, in the shadowy corridors of power, where technocrats and advisors operate without accountability, perpetuating the illusion of leadership.
This can be understood through the concept of desiring-production. The presidency itself becomes a desiring-machine, producing and reproducing power in a decentralized manner. This decentralization is not a loss of power, but a transformation of it. Power is diffused throughout the bureaucratic machine, creating a network of interconnected assemblages that collectively maintain control. The president is a war machine that has been captured by the State apparatus, repurposed to serve as a symbolic figurehead while the real work of governance occurs within the molecular flows of the bureaucratic machine.
Finally, the swapping out of figureheads when polling tanks is a perfect example of what Žižek might describe as the logic of the commodity form. The president, like any other commodity, has a shelf life. When the brand loses its appeal, it is simply replaced with a new one, without any substantive change in the underlying structure. This is the ultimate form of ideological recycling, where the same political machinery continues to operate under the guise of “change.” The system remains intact, even as the figureheads are swapped out, much like how capitalism reinvents itself by appropriating and commodifying dissent.
This is an example of reterritorialization after deterritorialization. When a president’s popularity declines, the political machine undergoes a process of deterritorialization—the destabilization of the existing power structures. However, rather than allowing this process to lead to a true transformation, the machine reterritorializes by introducing a new figurehead, capturing the flows of desire and redirecting them into familiar, controlled channels. This cycle of deterritorialization and reterritorialization is central to the operation of the capitalist state, which constantly seeks to capture and control the flows of desire that threaten to escape its grasp.
In this expanded analysis, we see that the formula for presidential politics is not just a cynical manipulation of appearances, but a complex assemblage of desire, power, and control. The political machine operates through the continuous coding, decoding, and recoding of desire, maintaining its grip on power by capturing and redirecting the flows that constitute the social body. The president, the Party, and the media are all part of this assemblage, each playing their role in the perpetual production and reproduction of power.
This the formula that describes the dark heart of contemporary politics: a cynical, post-ideological game where power is maintained not through the articulation of grand visions or the clash of ideas, but through the careful management of appearances and the manipulation of collective desires. The real tragedy, however, lies in the fact that the masses, too, have become complicit in this spectacle, willingly participating in the charade, even as they suspect that it is all an elaborate lie.
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Let’s get into the dynamics of complicity and desire as they pertain to the masses’ participation in this spectacle of politics.
The Ideological Fantasy and the Lizard Brain
The tragedy of the masses’ complicity lies in the fetishistic disavowal that characterizes their engagement with political narratives. The masses know that the political process is an elaborate lie, yet they continue to participate in it as if it were real. This is the essence of ideological fantasy—the fantasy that sustains the very structure of ideology itself.
The appeal to the “lizard brain,” or the most primal, instinctual parts of human consciousness, is crucial here. Politics, in its contemporary form, operates at the level of affect rather than reason. It bypasses rational discourse and appeals directly to the base instincts—fear, tribalism, desire for power, and so on. The masses are drawn to political narratives that stimulate these instincts, even as they suspect that the entire process is an orchestrated farce. They are trapped in a paradoxical relationship with the spectacle: they see through it, yet they are invested in it, deriving a perverse enjoyment from their own complicity.
This enjoyment, or jouissance, is what keeps the masses attached to the ideological structure. They are not merely dupes of the system; rather, they are subjects of desire who derive a certain pleasure from the very lies they claim to see through. The tragedy is that this enjoyment sustains the very system they might otherwise oppose. In a sense, the masses are enjoying their own subjection—finding pleasure in the cynical manipulation of their desires, even as they lament the emptiness of the political spectacle.
Desiring-Machines and the Auction of Narratives
From a Deleuzian perspective, the masses’ complicity can be understood in terms of the functioning of desiring-machines within the political assemblage. The political system operates as a socius—a social machine that captures and organizes the flows of desire, channeling them into the production of narratives that appeal to the “lizard brain.”
The “auction of narratives” is not merely a metaphor but a real process in which political narratives are constantly produced, exchanged, and consumed. These narratives are coded to resonate with the primal instincts of the masses, creating a feedback loop in which desire is continually decoded and recoded within the political machine. The masses, as desiring-machines themselves, are drawn into this process, participating in the auction not as passive consumers, but as active producers and reproducers of these narratives.
In Deleuze’s terms, this complicity is a form of reterritorialization—the masses, through their participation, continually reterritorialize the political field, reinforcing the existing power structures even as they appear to challenge them. The auction of narratives is a form of reterritorialization of desire, where the free-flowing, chaotic potential of desire is captured and redirected into controlled, predictable channels. The appeal to the lizard brain is a means of stratification, layering and organizing desire in such a way that it reinforces the existing social order.
The real tragedy, then, is that this process forecloses the possibility of true deterritorialization—a rupture in the political assemblage that might allow for the emergence of new forms of collective desire and social organization. The masses, in their complicity, become part of the machinic assemblage that sustains the status quo. They are not just victims of the system but active participants in its reproduction, their desires harnessed and repurposed by the political machine.
The Symbiotic Tragedy
Thus, we reveal the full scope of this tragedy: the masses are complicit not merely because they are manipulated, but because their very desires are entangled with the mechanisms of their own subjection. They participate in the auction of narratives, drawn by the appeal to their lizard brain, even as they harbor the suspicion that it is all a lie. Yet this suspicion is itself part of the machinery, a necessary component of the ideological structure that keeps the system intact.
In this symbiotic relationship between the masses and the political machine, the potential for genuine political transformation is continually deferred. The spectacle feeds on the complicity of the masses, who, in their pursuit of pleasure, fear, and power, unwittingly reinforce the very structures they might wish to dismantle. The tragedy is not simply that they are deceived, but that their desires are so thoroughly integrated into the spectacle that they cannot escape it, even when they see through it.